Opponents say [Washington state] voters were persuaded at least partly because the initiative and its boosters exploited deep-seated prejudices and misunderstandings about transgender people to erode their rights.
Opponents say [Washington state] voters were persuaded at least partly because the initiative and its boosters exploited deep-seated prejudices and misunderstandings about transgender people to erode their rights.
There needs to be some distinction and nuance to this conversation.
Adult sports is and entirely different kettle of fish from youth sports. Studies have shown that after ~2 years on HRT, trans women have performance in line with cis women, rather than cis men. For adult leagues, this is about as clear of an evidence-driven requirement as there can be, and it helpfully eliminates the ‘I’m going to identify as a women for the WNBA draft so I can make a political statement’ stuff. Adult sports careers, even in the most demanding sports are at least ~10yrs long, giving enough time to meet the HRT requirement.
For youth sports, particularly highschool just post-puberty, there is not a clear distinction. If we stick the same 2-year HRT cutoff, that would effectively eliminate trans participation in sports already, as full medical transitioning is rare at that young of an age, and anyone who decided to transition after the start of the sophomore year season would be ineligible for their remaining time in high school. This would mean the child would need to commit to full medical transition by the age of 15-16 at the latest - in which case they could play one season in their senior year. I don’t think this kind of time pressure would be healthy for young people making that kind of choice.
If we can’t use that evidence-driven criterion, we are just out in the messy jungle of feelings and politics.
Frankly, I don’t see a solution that satisfies every consideration for this case. All kids should get to play sports, but it should also be as fair as possible to every participant. Kids shouldn’t feel hopeless because someone on their team or the other team is literally built differently, nor should a trans athlete be denied real competition and opportunities to learn through failure and effort.
There are basically 4 options:
Each of them will make some people very unhappy, and ultimately be unfair to some subset of the trans population.